John McFarland - obituary

John McFarland was a surgeon, sailor and bus mate of Lee Harvey Oswald just
before JFK’s killing

John McFarland , who has died aged 83, was a respected surgeon in Liverpool; outside his professional life he was an adventurous sailor, and he also once travelled across America on a Greyhound bus in the company of President Kennedy’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald.

McFarland was doing research at the University of Mississippi when, in September 1963 (two months before the assassination), he and his young wife, Meryl, boarded a bus at Jackson, Mississippi, bound for Mexico City.

As they later testified to the Warren Commission, they first saw Oswald on September 26 when they changed buses at Houston, Texas. Oswald told them that he had come from New Orleans, where he was secretary of the local branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Organisation, and that he was on his way to Cuba in the hope of meeting President Castro — he was going via Mexico City because it was illegal to travel to Cuba from the United States.

Oswald, they said, had been wearing “ordinary slacks and, a more definite recollection, a sort of zipper jerkin”. After Kennedy’s death the McFarlands had recognised him as their fellow passenger from his pictures in the newspapers. During McFarland’s later career as a surgeon in Liverpool, he would occasionally be contacted by representatives of the FBI investigating aspects of the assassination.

The eldest of three sons of the Professor of Orthopaedics at Liverpool University, John Bryan McFarland was born on September 17 1930, and educated at Trearddur House prep school in Anglesey (where the family had a holiday home) and then Shrewsbury. He read Medicine at Liverpool University, qualifying in 1954. After house jobs in his home city and in Edinburgh, he did National Service (1955-57) with the RAMC, mainly in Kenya at the time of the Mau Mau uprisings.

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After his spell in America, McFarland returned to Liverpool. He was appointed consultant surgeon, senior lecturer in the Department of Surgery at the University of Liverpool, and to an NHS post at the David Lewis Northern Hospital. He then practised at the Royal Southern Hospital (until it closed in 1978) and the new Royal Liverpool Hospital. As well as developing an interest in gastrointestinal surgery, he became recognised for his gifts as a clinical researcher, and he published regularly throughout his career.

When the Royal Liverpool opened in 1978, McFarland helped to recruit artists to create stimulating murals inside the building — and was displeased to learn during his retirement that these had been destroyed as part of the refurbishment to make the hospital “fit for purpose” in the 21st century.

Since his father had died in his early sixties, partly through overwork, McFarland resolved to retire while he could still enjoy life. Aged 61 he threw a leaving party at the Royal Liverpool, and the next morning he left Britain, sailing down the Mersey into the Irish Sea in his Vancouver 32 (his passion for sailing had been nurtured during family holidays in Anglesey).

For the next four years he sailed the Mediterranean, sometimes in the company of his son, Jonathan, before deciding to settle at Soller in Majorca, where he was based for the rest of his life.

For several years he spent winters in India, working as a doctor at a small hospital run by nuns in Cochin in the state of Kerala, where many of the patients were fishermen and their families.

John McFarland’s wife Meryl , whom he married in 1962, was the daughter of Andrew Mckie Reid, an eminent Liverpool ophthalmologist. She died in 2000; their son survives him.